Renowned Swedish meteorologist/climatologist Lennart Bengtsson resigned from the board of a global warming think tank after only about a month after claiming that he was being harassed by his fellow scientists outside the organization.

Bengtsson, the author of more than 200 climate-related papers and the former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, is currently a research fellow at the University of Reading in the UK.

In resigning from the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, which describes itself as “open-minded on the contested science of global warming,” Bengtsson, 79, wrote:

“I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years…”

Professor Bengtsson originally joined the organization, which is considered skeptical of man-made global warming, because it “would provide a platform for me to bring more common sense into the global climate change debate.”

Bengtsson also claimed that a paper he co-authored challenging United Nations findings about the rate of global warming has been suppressed by a peer-review journal. Said Bengtsson, “The problem we have now in the scientific community is that some scientists are mixing up their scientific role with that of climate activist … It is an indication of how science is gradually being influenced by political views.”

According to the French foreign minister who visited the US last week, however, the world has just “500 days” to avoid “climate chaos.”

Do you think the climate change movement is engaging in bullying of those scientists who don’t necessarily buy into the entire global warming consensus?